If videogames are the new Hollywood – a common refrain among the industry's executives – then EA Sports is the 21st century equivalent of one of the old-time studios. It is, after all, an unashamedly populist entertainment company that turns out crowd-pleasing blockbuster sequels. For EA Sports, its big titles — such as Fifa, Madden NFL and Tiger Woods Golf — are the gaming equivalent of cinematic favourites James Bond or Batman: enduring franchises that can be relied on to get bums on seats.

But while yearly updates are the cornerstone of EA Sports's success, the strategy is often derided by purists. They lash out at the company for simply churning out incremental improvements on an annual basis and laugh at fans for splashing out each year. In fact, the complaint is so common that even David Rutter – the producer in charge of the Fifa series – admits to having had his doubts in the past.

"I know before I came to Electronic Arts – and for a long time – I used to look at what EA Sports did with their yearly franchise iterations with a little bit of a sneer on my face, and think they were just fleecing everyone," he says.

These days, unsurprisingly, he disagrees with that assessment. "If you actually look at the stuff we put in year to year, not just the new kits or players or graphical enhancements, if you look at the volume of features that we're putting in and the amount of games that are played of Fifa year on year, and how long the lifespan of our game lasts, I think it's very good value for money."

That opinion will be put to the test on Friday with the launch of Fifa 10, the latest instalment of the world's biggest football game. It certainly promises big things. The game has received astounding reviews and most critics believe it will continue to outpace its main rival – Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer (PES), which has a new version due at the end of October.

The underdog has its day

This is important to Rutter and his team not just because Fifa is one of EA Sports's biggest titles, but also because it is part of a remarkable turnaround over recent years. For the best part of the past decade, Fifa has been locked in a grim title tussle with PES. For years, the difference between the two was fairly clear cut — Fifa was the official franchise that looked good but often lacked soul while critics praised the underdog PES for its high-quality gameplay.

In recent years, however, Fifa has been improving drastically – until, with the 2009 version, the unthinkable happened: reviewers consistently rated Fifa the best football game around. This was no coincidence, but the result of a concerted effort to improve the game's quality — and looking at the inner workings of Fifa, it is clear that vast effort goes into producing it.

As with most modern blockbuster games, Fifa has a huge staff. About 60 people work full-time on the title, improving the gameplay, mechanics and artificial intelligence with each iteration. Visually, the graphics continue to improve and are closing in swiftly on photorealism. A separate audio team, meanwhile, spend weeks recording countless variations of in-game commentary across a spread of languages (in English, the duties are performed by Sky Sports team Martin Tyler and Andy Gray).

All of this doesn't even begin to touch on the work of the 10-strong stats team, who run a network of hundreds of informal scouts and volunteers who monitor how thousands of players around the world are performing. The vast, sprawling operation – run out of an enormous campus outside Vancouver – is all part of trying to get the game to accurately reflect real life.

But the most important improvements in recent years have come in online play. Today, thousands of gamers play simultaneously in matches featuring up to 10 active players on each side.

"At peak times, which is about 8.30pm to 9.30pm GMT, we have anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people playing Fifa constantly on one platform and the same on the other. So you're looking at 100,000 gamers playing Fifa. For me, if we were fleecing people for money you wouldn't be seeing that a long, long time after release."

Lethal in the box

That development raises other questions. If online play is so important, why does EA need to release a new boxed version each year? Couldn't they silence critics by delivering online updates that keep up to date with at the start of each season?

"It's a good question, and we get asked it quite a bit," says Rutter. "Strategically I think it's something in the future that will become increasingly important. [But] we are a packaged goods videogames company – what we try to do is make money from videogames."

Convincing buyers to spend £50 on a downloadable package would most likely be difficult – even if it updated the game mechanics or graphics engine. And lower prices would have an impact on profits, therefore leading to the long-term deterioration of the game.

Sticking with traditional boxed games is a pragmatic approach to the internet that almost seems contrary in a world where going online seems to drive the price of everything down. But this, perhaps, is one of the games industry's big secrets: big names like Electronic Arts are effectively turning boxed games into an annual subscription for online play, which in turn gives gamers more playing time and makes them more loyal to the product.

That gives the team at EA at least a little breathing room – and despite the huge leaps taken in recent years, Rutter says there is still room for improvement. "Every time I watch a real football match, every game you watch, you see something that happens that our game just can't do," he says. "For us I think there's a few things ... we've got lists already of things that we want to get to, things we want to try. I don't think we'll ever be happy."

Bobbie Johnson travelled to EA Canada studios as a guest of Electronic Arts